In the first part of this series, we looked at the impact that workload, speed of change and technology complexity is having to companies in search of Service Excellence, overviewed the SLM process, introduced the IBM Service Management(ISM) Service Level Management Process Manager (SLMPM) and discussed automating SLM. The second and final part addresses best practices implemented in the Process Manager.
Best practices implemented in the Process Manager
The Service Level Management process manager will provide best practices, in the form of process workflow definitions, for the following:
- Create and maintain agreements (SLA, OLA and UC)
- Conduct Service Review
- Formulate Service Improvement Plan
- Create and Maintain Service Catalog
- SLA Adjudication
Supporting tasks (tasks that are performed outside of a process template) will be provided for the Monitor and Report on SLA Achievement process. It should be noted that not all of the above best practices may be available in the first release of the SLM Process Manager; it may take several releases to get all the processes fully implemented.
Create and Maintain Agreements Process Workflow Definition
Multiple process workflows (best practices) will be provided for the Create and Maintain Service Level Agreements process. The different workflow definitions reflect the differences in the process flow required based upon the type of agreement being processed. There will be unique process workflow provided for creating and updating SLAs, OLAs and UCs. There may also be additional workflow definitions for creating a specific type of SLA, for example an SLA associated with transaction response time may have a different process template than an SLA for incident resolution times.
The image below shows all the activities that are available for the Create and Maintain SLA process workflows. It is important to realize that every activity isn’t performed in all process workflow definition. For example, if the create process is being performed for an OLA the "Negotiate SLA" activity wouldn’t be contained in the process template for creating Operation Level Agreements. The user of the process could add that activity to the default process template if the organization wanted it performed for OLAs using the ISM process customization views provided. The tasks that are performed as part of each activity aren’t discussed in this article but the image below does provide a high-level description of the activity and tasks comprising that activity.
Create and Maintain SLA Activities
The Create and Maintain processes will leverage resources and relationships contained in the CCMDB to help determine which resources and dependencies are needed to provide the service for which the agreement is being implemented. These resources, their dependents and their dependencies (as represented in the CCMDB) will be analyzed to determine if each is being monitored and being monitored in a way to support the data needed for the agreement. The monitoring information will be obtained by leveraging the Discovery Library Adapters (DLA) provided by many of the Tivoli monitoring tools. These products will load the resources they monitor into the CCMDB via their DLA and the CCMDB will record that the Change Item (resource) is monitored by the Operational Management Product (OMP) that is the source of the DLA information.
The output of the Create and Maintain SLAs process is an agreement (SLA, OLA and UC) that has been reviewed, clearly documented, approved and enacted. The SLMPM is optimized to allow the agreements created via the process to be fed into the Tivoli products that monitor and report on SLA achievement. The Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) and Tivoli Service Level Advisor (TSLA) products will be able to directly consume the output of the SLMPM process workflows associated with creating and maintaining SLA, OLA and UC agreements. This will allow the agreement definitions needed in TSLA and TBSM to be created using the information collected during the SLM process execution, thus reducing the time needed to create and maintain the definitions in the OMPs.
Conduct Service Review
A process template representing the best practice for the SLM Conduct Service Review process will be provided. This template will contain the activities shown in the diagram below. The process can be invoked manually on an on-demand basis or be scheduled to occur on a regular (weekly or monthly are typical frequencies) per agreement basis. An imbedded activity in this process is the SLA Adjudication activity, discussed in further detail below.
Conduct Service Review Activities
SLA Adjudication Process Template
SLMPM process workflows will also be provided for activities that have been identified as SLM best practices when doing the SLMPM process, activity and task design. A good example of this is SLA adjudication. While not explicitly called out as an SLM process in ITIL or ITUP, SLA adjudication is a necessary activity in any organization that has implemented Service Level Management. SLA adjudication deals with the process of adjusting the data or results associated with SLA attainment for a specific period. These adjustments are allowable and necessary when SLA attainment isn’t achieved and the reason(s) for not achieving the SLA are not the fault of the service provider. For example a network failure occurred but the network isn’t part of the SLA contract with an application provider. In SLA adjudication the outage associated with the network failure would be removed from the SLA evaluation and the SLA attainment numbers would be recalculated. The SLMPM will provide an activity template for SLA adjudication.
SLA Adjudication Activity Tasks
Monitor and Report on SLA Achievement
The SLM process of Monitor and Report Service Level Achievements is where the availability metrics for the agreement are analyzed to determine if the agreement was satisfied for the reporting period. The SLMPM will not provide this analytics engine. The determination and analytics associated with SLA achievement is the responsibility of OMPs (TSLA or TBSM) or customer specific processes or products. The output of analyzing the SLA attainment is utilized by the SLMPM as input into the Conduct Service Review and Formulate Service Improvement Plan processes. Process workflows will be provided by SLMPM for both these processes.
In summary, SLM can help customers achieve service excellence and can be used as an initiative to drive the alignment between the business and Service Management. Customers can leverage TSLA today as the foundation for SLM and then move to automate the process when the SLMPM is available.
Authors:
Chris Terry, Wayne Riley and James Moore
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